Insect pests, such as termites, cause damage to crops and manmade structures estimated at over $30 billion per year, imposing a global challenge for human economy.
Insect immune systems are simple, efficient and still enigmatic (1-3). Somatic immunoglobulin hypervariability has been observed in Anopheles and Drosophila (4, 5) and may represent ancestral versions of adaptive immunity, although its evolutionary and functional significance in this context is not clear. Insects employ other, well-characterized mechanisms. Among these are pattern recognition receptors, which recognize molecular determinants unique to different classes of pathogenic microorganisms (1-3).